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It also shows you how to avoid the increasingly common bait-and-switch, in which food manufacturers add a plant-source omega-3 called ALA to a food product and label it “fortified with omega-3s.”

They hope that consumers won’t know that their bodies can only convert from two to 10 percent of those omega-3s into the kind the body actually needs: the EPA and DHA found in fish and needed in human cells.

Article highlights a public health hero and his message

The Eating Well feature centers on their interview with Joseph Hibbeln, M.D., who’s a Captain in the U.S. Public Health Service … hence, the article’s teaser in the table of contents: “Captain of the Happier Meal.”

Joe Hibbeln is also a clinical psychiatrist for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (part of the National Institutes of Health), where he’s Acting Chief of the Section on Nutritional Neurosciences.

We first met Dr. Hibbeln at a 2005 Seafood & Health conference in Washington, D.C., and have since spent time with him at gatherings of omega-3 scientists and nutrition-savvy physicians and health professionals.

He’s been one of a small group of researchers at NIH who’ve shed light on the health benefits of fish and supplemental omega-3s from fish.

Joe Hibbeln has focused his work on the mental health and child-development benefits of omega-3s. For example, see:

Most recently, he organized a conference for the U.S. military, where leading academic experts educated key officers about the potential mental health and performance benefits of raising service members’ intake of omega-3s … and reducing their consumption of omega-6 fats (see “Soldiers and Omega-3s: Pentagon Pitched on Benefits”).

We call this pattern the “omega imbalance.” It only dates back about 100 years, and flows from two factors:

Lack of fish (or fish oils) in Americans’ diets

The dominance of omega-6-rich vegetable oils (corn, cottonseed, soy, sunflower, and safflower) in America’s restaurant, takeout, and packaged foods… as well as in the grains and soy fed to U.S. livestock.

A fast-growing body of evidence links the omega imbalance to greater risk of cancer, diabetes, depression, immune disorders, and dementia.

“For years, Hibbeln and others have advocated eating lots of omega-3-rich fish to restore the omega balance in the brain. But they haven’t lost sight of the fact that animal studies suggest slashing the omega-6s may work just as well. ‘We don’t need to increase the world’s fisheries production tenfold to achieve the same goal,’ says Hibbeln.”

“‘Eating a traditional Mediterranean-style diet that’s centered on vegetables and fruits, legumes and olive oil, provides plenty of seafood and is limited in meat, will help to lower omega-6 intake dramatically’, says Hibbeln.”

Because Dr. Hibbeln’s research focuses on brain health, the article doesn’t address the implications of America’s “omega imbalance” for other major health problems from cancer to diabetes.